The Painter
By Chris Whitley
- 2009 reads
He stretches the canvas human size,
as big as him,
as big as he can be.
The canvas and his hand are bigger than the world,
and will stretch the eye and mind.
He lays down material on material
which have their own truth – flat
-- no window to tell lies through.
The viewer is always the vanishing point
a moving Janus perspective.
While artistically engaged
he is mind, heart, and soul.
in the sublime of unconscious taste.
His optic operas are real
transfered to paint.
His only motives are vested in the stars
he does or dies,
our man who’s magnetised.
He has reached yet another
creation day
An alchemist’s air is needed to fly.
He sucks the ether
reading the temperature of his soul.
His brain is like a raw swollen sun
in his heightened romance of being.
In the full fire of truth his crystal clear eyes
sing over the canvas.
His golden vision working for him.
Synchronicity! He will take his chance.
All life hangs in the balance of his spell.
On his spider thread of imagination
he steps out over this world.
Gravity seems to fail,
and the strangeness of fate dances him high.
Eyes stare up, from lantern land below-- the face of spawn.
But they see through him
to their own fusty frozen ideals
He has one foot in heaven and one in hell.
By dramatic illusion
he is leaving the paradigm --
and if not?
He will plunge back into
predictable mundane mortality.
Every step his fate full foot
presses down on the scales of destiny --
in synchronicity
The life of the picture,
in his vision language,
he will hand over to the viewer.
In this self portrait against a smashed sky,
he stands shackled open armed,
like a modern Christ.
His paint as blood
his canvas as cross
in this place of sculls
Ecce Homo --
persecuted man.
Persecuted for what he says,
for what he does,
for what he thinks,
and for what he is.
Persecuted for his humanity
He is the hood, the prisoner, the thief, the beggar, etc.,
and all who suffer in this hollow world.
But this congealed life on canvas
somehow saves the Everyman.
And you and I -- the investment of betrayal,
are the Romans, the Sanhedrin, or the mob.
Our hands as stained as the painter’s.
Blood and paint -- paint and blood.
He means to paint our sickness to keep it at bay:
This something that sets the worms on us.
He paints a fecund cross of fear and hope
For the hole in the soul must be repaired.
We are redeemable!
With arty fingers, falcon eye,
and brush of fire,
he explodes on his surface.
The noise outside himself is deafening.
Yet music weeps from his eyes
He inspirits the mutable man to a genetic flow, finding form.
But like life, jarring, and full of discord.
The naked hanging body is slashed with viscous red,
a blackened anguished face,
dead eyes sunk in sockets of blue-white bone.
The heart torn from the chest to show
he is like you and I.
This tortured torso could be anywhere
could be now -- right?
Then like Pilate
he washes his hands of it.
The painting loud, but, loud in solitude.
The painter quiet -- in reptile bliss.
The ghost has been exorcised,
The last chip of ice melted in his heart.
And the looping laugh of the universe
finally
falls
silent.
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